In San Francisco, a Tailored Blend of East and West

She's very fashion forward and acutely aware of cultural trends," interior designer Steven Volpe says of the client for whom he remodeled a 1920s apartment in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. "But she acknowledges the fact that unlike things of the moment—new shoes, new bags—great rooms don't come with a date stamp. We were in full agreement that one's living space should transcend hipness: that at home, especially, a timeless aesthetic is always correct."

The 3,000-square-foot apartment makes up the third floor of an eight-story residential building with surrounding vistas of the city and the bay. The owner and her late husband had lived there for more than two decades; upon his death, she approached Volpe, who had previously done a commercial interior for her, to adapt the residence to her evolving living style. Originally, the program was to add a dressing area to the master suite. Once into the renovation, however, she said what are most often to a designer the magic words: "I would like for you to look at this as a larger project." Volpe's refinements ultimately involved stripping the entire apartment to its bare walls and converting four bedrooms into a revamped master suite, a study and three dressing closets. He would also completely redo the elevator lobby, entrance hall, living room, dining room, sunroom and breakfast area.

Commencing the expanded scope of the project, designer and client went to New York for a week of concentrated exploration. Their first significant find was an early-19th-century Japanese tagasode similar to one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a depiction, in silk and gold thread, of geisha accoutrements titled, appropriately, A Place of Her Own. "That was the starting point," Volpe says of the wall panel that now commands the living room and hangs on axis with the apartment's entrance, "the inspiration from which we pulled the palette and the whole Tokyo/Shanghai-crashing-with-Paris theme."

The furnishings are eclectic, primarily a mixture of 1940s and '50s French, 18th-century Japanese and Chinese and mid-20th-century American; contemporary artworks integrate with groupings of fine porcelain vases and other collected objects. Detailing his selection of pieces by Ramsay, Jansen, Baguès, Jacques Adnet and Jean-Michel Frank, Volpe says, "The French Moderne point of view seemed to me the perfect foil for Asian accessories." Furniture not acquired through galleries or at auction is, for the most part, by Steven Volpe Design, including a linen-velvet-covered sofa and the hand-carved oak (with crocodile-stamped leather) bed.

The dining table, of quarter-sawn oak with brass inlay, was custom-designed by Volpe to precise functional requirements. "It had to seat a certain number for dinner parties and break down to smaller sizes for everyday use," he explains. "It also had to stand alone but be neutral enough to work with the chairs, which tend to read as sculpture." Designed for the Villa Kerylos on the French Riviera, now a house museum built in the classical Greek style during the Belle Époque, the elmwood chairs had been deaccessioned by the museum, purchased by an antiques dealer in San Francisco and delivered to a restorer there in preparation for display. "I happened to be at the restorer's checking on something when I saw them," Volpe recalls. "I arranged to take one for my client's approval and virtually flew the distance to her office, I was so thrilled with the discovery."

There remains no vestige of the former apartment, whose look was, Volpe remarks, "high 1970s." Small windows fronting "disposable" views had been covered with painted lattice, since an infusion of natural light was not a design priority. He opened up the rooms by eliminating connecting doors in the living areas; his use there of a pale, sheer wool for the draperies lends the perimeter a diaphanous quality. Softly reflective surfaces and subtle shiftings of textures and shades—the tufted lounge chairs in the living room, for instance, are each covered in pig suede of an almost imperceptibly different tone—further work to capture and contain daylight.

To effect a softly luminous entrance procession in day and night, Volpe installed in the entrance hall the same silver-and-white-gold tea paper ("It evokes that special glamour of the '30s and '40s") that he used in the elevator lobby. He emphasized, in applying a decorative pattern of linear moldings, the barrel-vaulted ceiling, thoroughly transforming what had been a "dark, cavelike" introduction to the residence. Moldings continue in the apartment as a unifying element; the doorways first seen from the elevator are also of a piece throughout, Volpe having standardized the degree of curve in their arches and made arches where none had existed.

Volpe, who had worked with California interior design luminaries Anthony Hail, Eleanor Ford and Tony Machado before establishing his own practice more than 20 years ago, prides himself on spaces whose contents are particularly well chosen: "There's not a lot of superfluous furniture floating around in my rooms," he says. "My whole thing is about quality and how to thread the way someone wants to live with my vision. What I was aiming for here can be compared, in a sense, to my client's old Hermès handbags. After years and years, and having been made by the best hands, they're the items in her wardrobe that are the simplest and most beautiful: both classic and modern, and very personal."

Still, the woman loves fashion. "It's fun for her," Volpe says. "She opens the door to her closet and says, Who do I want to be today?' " Which makes a harmonious and quiet environment all the more desirable, if not essential. "There is so much color, so much visual stimulation, in her life otherwise. I created a relief from all that: the home as a restrained, exquisitely tailored backdrop."

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